I Don't Know What This Is…

I’m not sure I want to be a writer but I’m sure I want to write.

You may have heard that the formula for being a writer is ‘apply ass to chair’. This sentiment was first recorded more eloquently in 1911 by Mary Heaton Vorse, who apparently advised a group of aspiring authors to ‘apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair’.

My arse is in the chair. I’m not sure I want to be a writer but I’m sure I want to write.

This is an always thing. It emerged as I was learning to physically write, making books out of paper and staples, drawing pictures and putting titles on them copied from bigger books, real books, in one of the family bookshelves.

One specific bookshelf stands out in memory because it was a mixture of shapes, sizes and colours and above it was a framed image of Christ with his Sacred Heart showing, long-haired wearing a thorny crown and with blood on his brow. On reflection, this was in everyone’s house we knew pretty much (I am a fully qualified, lapsed Catholic) but it was still terrifying and fascinating to have it up there, a wan look on his face as he leaned forward and showed his TRANSPARENT HEART SURROUNDED WITH THORNS AND FLAMES!

The bookshelf was gardening and cooking and poetry and history and cricket and politics and feminism and a huge gold trimmed, leather bound bible and stories of mountain cattlemen and their huts in the High Country. It was a shelf holding books to furnish and testify to lives full of gifts and passions and curiosities. It not only attracted my attention but made me want to, somehow, maybe, write the words which went into them – eventually – once my writing was of a standard.

I wrote tall tales and recounts and adventures and stole bits of ones I liked to read. I wrote a lot about war, but also about Elvis and Ned Kelly and The Beatles and The Eiffel Tower and my family. I drew a bit, too, and while school provided most creative opportunities back then, I just did it on my own and found I enjoyed it and that other people sometimes liked it too. I wrote about my Grandad after he died, which my teacher really liked, and embarrassed my own Dad by writing about his love of beer because I forgot to mention he rarely went beyond one of them on any one day and mostly shared them with whoever visited. I wrote about anything and everything but was someone who wrote, not a writer, and did not really understand what a writer was or that it was a job until I discovered it one day by accident. Not only were there writers but there were different kinds of writers. I couldn’t decide if I was more a non-fiction writer or fiction writer or even a writer! It turned out that it was hard to decide because what I really liked doing was sitting and writing and still do, mostly, by hand or by typing and with no real objective other than to write and get it all down or out.

I remember one holiday being in the vinyl back seat driving up Sydney Road in Melbourne, headed to Nana’s farm. For a kid from Warragul the sights and sounds and colour and life outside the window was another exotic country, so I grabbed a notebook and pen and began writing down a stream of consciousness description and realised it felt good to do it. I did not know it one day might be useful but writing felt good, just the doing, and I learned that when I don’t write it feels like I get all blocked up and backed up and then the thinking runs like a river and I get compelled to write but then sometimes I remember to do it and sometimes I am too busy and just bounce around wondering why I am so frustrated and it feels like the same thing that people who run or ride or swim or play golf talk about too. It is a compulsion, I guess, but something else hard to describe beyond that, and when I had and have time it is one of my most favourite things and one day I knew I would have time and space to write like I wanted to.

Through secondary school I liked to write but we seemed to get less and less opportunity to do it and anyhow, more important things like sport and girls and parties emerged. It was that time in life when social death is much worse than real death and without realising I started hiding and denying that I wrote, or wanted to write. Maybe this was shame or fear or something else – it is so hard to remember now – but I wrote secret poetry and bad song lyrics and short stories and deeply self reflective, navel gazing pages of teen angst and intellectual earnestness and this is no doubt due to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Grunge, but also authors like Jack Kerouac (who sounded exhausting) and all the other great storytellers who showed me how when words fit together they not only told great stories but also created music and magic and could describe people and places and experiences in ways simple and profound and when I looked at much of my writing, could not make sense of what it was or what it was for, but only that I needed to do it. One day, I thought, I might even try and make money from writing so I could do it all the time and get paid, once I finished school and locked in my back up plan and had the time and space to give it my full attention.

An offshoot of this was a growing love of pens and stationery and black ink on white paper. It was stalking bookshops and then writing when the mood took me and then mostly not writing. It was about waiting for the inspiration to periodically come and then realising it would not. I wrote in all kinds of voices and for all kinds of reasons but the main ones were to figure out what I was thinking and make sense of what I was feeling and create stories more interesting than mine or places I could escape to and maybe share, now and then, but not often. I wanted to help people through stories and maybe I thought becoming a famous writer and novelist and this is how I would make my way through the world. I went to university and saw and found more and more writers and wanted to connect with the creatives but never did because it was easier to hide it and avoid the awkwardness and embarrassment when you showed people and they didn’t react the way you wanted or it wasn’t for them so I concealed it, and denied it, and watched bad television instead, but only until I decide to get serious about writing and make it the thing.

When I began working and travelling and travelling and working I discovered email and blogging and started to play around with those two ways of writing and sharing them with people, whether they wanted me to or not. I sent monthly emails for a while which tried to lighten the mood and find a voice, but also for some kind of discipline to wedge into a busy life and see where this writing itch went. I entered some short story competitions and did not even get rejection slips. I became really good at coming up with titles of novels and even started some and got beyond the first chapter. I wrote bad poetry and played with words and wrote diaries and journals. When I was feeling particularly bad about not writing anything I would go to a bookshop and look for books to inspire me to write or help me learn how to write. I was getting ready to break out into regular, world changing writing and this getting ready took some twenty years or so, which is a lot of getting ready instead of actually writing.

There were times I did write stuff, though, and even published it. They were small big things, crafted over long summer holidays and about things I knew about or had experienced. I fell for that aphorism – if you want to write interesting stuff, live an interesting life. My first paid writing gig was a magazine article about a trip down the Franklin River in Tasmania, driven mostly by someone else’s energy and persistence to match my words with someone else’s pictures and hustle to get it in print. I wrote a terrible book about the first couple of weeks backpacking overseas with a mate, which unintentionally broke all the rules about having things like structure and proofreading and anything interesting to say, but I was 23 and thought it was possibly profound. I self-published it on some long dead platform and bought the only copies that sold, I think, and gladly forgot the title and the nom de plume which went with it. After all – I had published a novel and that was easier than I thought but also nothing in the world changed like I thought it would, which was odd.

I was good at nom de plumes – convinced I would need to hide my identity because of certain success but also afraid that my students or employers or friends or family would find it, or see it, because it was so bad or maybe inappropriate. Then I knew I was probably a writer because of the neurosis but I also knew that would get sorted once I was a bit more established in my teaching career and had more time and discipline to write.

Then I went travelling again and wrote something almost like autofiction and it was about trying to process the grief around my Dad’s passing and I made the protagonist a particularly unlikeable and selfish version of myself and wrote it longhand one summer holiday in the most consistent thing I have ever done with writing, mainly because I was broke, but also because I needed to and it taught me, once I typed and shared a draft, that writing was something I wanted to do and thought I could do but was afraid to do because too much time alone was not always a good thing, and it was that fear rather than a fear of rejection and failure that kept me distracted and anyway, I lost that thing when a hard drive died and I lost a laptop and it is just another lost unfinished thing, but it gave me a taste of what I would and could do if I had the time.

Then I came home and work and life got busier and more responsible and writing became a dreamy hobby loosely growing from a bed of compulsion and I filled notebooks and diaries with mundane events across festivals and rituals and seasons. Out of this time a loose group of writers and friends got together and created a website called ‘The Flack’ which we tipped a bit of money and a lot of effort and casual seriousness into and built it until it broke up as things do. We wrote under aliases about sport and pop culture and the funny nuanced parts of life and produced content that people liked. It was regular writing once a week for a couple of years and I liked being a writer that got read and it scratched a creative and existential itch. It felt like progress too, like it might become something before it died a death slow and then sudden as those things do and I went back to wanting to write and not really doing it, which was okay because I headed towards forty and even more grown up things and responsibility and I just put it aside again for the time being until I could make the time to do it properly again.

Then the pandemic came and all the time along with it (Melbourne being pretty locked down during 2020 and 2021) and I started another blog and tried to be consistent again and apply all the advice that I knew writers and readers needed like ‘write about what you know’ and ‘write about one thing only so people know what to expect’ and ‘become and expert and reliable voice in your field’ and ‘develop your online presence’ and ‘publish consistently so people know what to expect’ and ‘yada’ and ‘yada’ and then ‘yada’. So I wrote about education and teaching and sometimes about life, aiming for serious and earnest, and when there was all that time at home it felt easier and there was time and space to shape and share good writing with people, full of views and experiences, but I got bored just writing about education and missed writing about whatever I wanted or took my fancy and then we emerged and it got HARD again and we all know that when it gets hard you make decisions and get distracted and I noticed that I wanted to write more than I actually wrote and I was still afraid and nervous when I hit ‘publish’ and took it badly when people liked it and also when they did not or if they ignored it. I did not like the feeling of publishing but loved the feeling of writing and how a day felt better when I had written and worse when I had not.

Despite all this, writing never got to the point I imagined it would or hoped it would or assumed it would. There was always something in the way and when I dug down and in and reflected, that something was often me and my choices and excuses. I got up early and wrote and bought new tools and stopped going to bookshops for inspiration and began hunting through all those old notebooks shoved in cupboards and boxes like an archeologist finding versions of themselves long gone. I felt inspired and supported by creative people like Austin Kleon and Rick Rubin and Natalie Goldberg and Steven Pressfield and all that effort and work in lockdowns, trying to ensure it was a good shipwreck, helped frame my purpose and define my main thing. When questions get asked like ‘what were you put on earth to do?’ I would usually have said ‘annoy people’ or even ‘teach and coach’, but what I really wanted to say, deep down, is ‘write’. So I ended up working through and discovering that my purpose was this:

‘To nourish and share a curious mind so we might honour the gift.’

But then again I am getting a tiny bit closer to understanding and learning what it is. It is imperfect action toward the main life thing and applying insights gained over time. It is also accepting that I don’t really know what it is yet, but it can only be something if it happens regularly and the arse is in the chair through those aforementioned festivals and rituals and seasons and it is not some path to immortality or fame or glory. It is doing the thing I always wanted to do and being persistent and consistent in curiosity and sharing, even though I am scared to do it and don’t know what it is. Especially because I am scared to do it and don’t know what it is.

What ‘this’ is… and by ‘this’ I mean the Substack page, Hynesight, yet another attempt to come out as a writer and get over the fear of writing and publishing and not being perfect or meeting the standards I expect of myself.

For now, let’s call this a vehicle for doing the main thing and accepting a challenge which feels to me just a little less difficult than going to the moon, such is the history of false starts, failed resolutions, archived blogs and withered nom de plumes.

This is me, arse in chair, being accountable with low expectations.

Specifically, I’ve challenged myself to write and publish a post each week of 2025, across the responsibilities, obligations, challenges and triumphs that emerge.

In case you missed it, I don’t know what this. Feel free to drop by and see if I can figure it out.